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Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

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Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#221

Post by bwfan123 »

hackermeows wrote: post #16

why would anyone work in startups as early devs anymore. Tell me what is the upside? There seems to be only downsides. Startup Fails , you loose - Gets acquired - you loose What is the motivation to perform .

faang has sucked the oxygen in the air. For experienced engineers, the one upside to startups is if you are a founder and you are creating a change you want to see in the world. But this delusion is shattered as time goes by and you realize that you are only a cog in a smaller wheel, whereas, in bigtech you are a cog in a bigger one.

On average, startups tend to have a better culture due to the incentives at play compared to big-tech. And that attracts engineers regardless of the comp.

Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#222

Post by HNdev1995 »

dom96 wrote: post #188
dmoy wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lean fire on $600k-$800k is taking an extreme gamble on the cost of health insurance continuing to be subsidized way beyond Medicaid levels. Which you might be fine with, but it's a pretty big risk. Unsubsidized healthcare in a lot of places in the US costs $10k-$20k per person per year. For early retirement that eats up like $400k-$500k per person.

This is why you don't retire in a country with private healthcare

My parents live in the UK which has free healthcare. The situation is dire. The waitlist for chronic pain surgeries are 3-4 years long. Lots of people, including my parents, have resorted to flying out to other cheaper countries to get treatment.

Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#223

Post by dboreham »

dboreham wrote: post #58
cyanydeez wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the board strokes is: Google should have bought the company. They didnt. They basically bought the employees. They call it a "acquihire". Without these employees, the real value of the company fell, allowing cognition to buy the company. Had the employee taken employement with Google, it's likely their shares in windsurf would have been voided, or otherwise not vested. Who knows, these private corporations are often…

> They call it a "acquihire" Surely it needs to be called something else, because acquihire means "hire some employees by means of acquiring the company they currently work for" (it's in the name). Since Google did not acquire the company, it can't be an acquihire event. "bribehire" or something?

Replying to myself because I discovered someone coined the term "Bizhire"[1]

[1] https://medium.com/@villispeaks/the-blitzhire-acquisition-e3...

Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#224

Post by barrkel »

chambers wrote: post #89

https://x.com/ahmaurya/status/1948491614160122308 Garry Tan posted "sounds like a tweet that cost $20M" which he later deleted. Smells like a strong bias against employees in favor of management and founders.

Tan is someone who can't handle disagreement or criticism. It likely leads him to live in an information bubble.

Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#225

Post by kstrauser »

supportengineer wrote: post #216
fusslo wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my equity from 2years pre-acquisition: ~$2800. Then the CEO gave out bonuses when everyone threatened to quit. Then after his 3 month vacation to Italy, he came back driving his new Ferrari. My equity from 4 years ( employee ~60, grew to over 500 ): worthless. No one is able to exercise any options. They also readjusted when the valuation came below the total raised, making the value of my vested shares ~$13k ( down…

The fun part comes when you put in 20 years doing this, and your dream is to buy a nice house, and you finally get your seven-figure payout, and.... it's not enough to buy a house. Because now a house is 3 million dollars.

What kind of house had you been dreaming of? I live in SF, and even here $3M goes an awfully freaking long way.

Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#226

Post by CaveTech »

jongjong wrote: post #213
fusslo wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my equity from 2years pre-acquisition: ~$2800. Then the CEO gave out bonuses when everyone threatened to quit. Then after his 3 month vacation to Italy, he came back driving his new Ferrari. My equity from 4 years ( employee ~60, grew to over 500 ): worthless. No one is able to exercise any options. They also readjusted when the valuation came below the total raised, making the value of my vested shares ~$13k ( down…

I worked for an ed-tech startup as employee number 4, joined when it was obscure; not even in the Alexa top 4 million rankings and almost no revenue. The founder was really good though and gave everyone shares instead of options. I got a bit under 0.2% equity in the company. The company grew (slowly and steadily) to $6.5 million USD revenue with about 10% net profit margins but its last valuation (over 10 years later…

Sorry to break it to you but 10% profit on 6.5M rev is very low and will absolutely not fetch a high multiple, especially considering this is a mature 10 year old business. This is not a high growth business and you may have grown overly rose colored glasses by thinking it could be priced as one.

Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#227

Post by wanderlust123 »

jongjong wrote: post #213
fusslo wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my equity from 2years pre-acquisition: ~$2800. Then the CEO gave out bonuses when everyone threatened to quit. Then after his 3 month vacation to Italy, he came back driving his new Ferrari. My equity from 4 years ( employee ~60, grew to over 500 ): worthless. No one is able to exercise any options. They also readjusted when the valuation came below the total raised, making the value of my vested shares ~$13k ( down…

I worked for an ed-tech startup as employee number 4, joined when it was obscure; not even in the Alexa top 4 million rankings and almost no revenue. The founder was really good though and gave everyone shares instead of options. I got a bit under 0.2% equity in the company. The company grew (slowly and steadily) to $6.5 million USD revenue with about 10% net profit margins but its last valuation (over 10 years later…

Why are the margins so low?

Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#228

Post by ageyfman »

fermentation wrote: post #208
fusslo wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my equity from 2years pre-acquisition: ~$2800. Then the CEO gave out bonuses when everyone threatened to quit. Then after his 3 month vacation to Italy, he came back driving his new Ferrari. My equity from 4 years ( employee ~60, grew to over 500 ): worthless. No one is able to exercise any options. They also readjusted when the valuation came below the total raised, making the value of my vested shares ~$13k ( down…

I often see job postings here looking for "top <1% engineer talent" paying $100k and <1% equity and I wonder who is actually applying.

they have to say this to safe face. people who're interviewing most of the time can't even tell if it's a 50% engineer

Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#229

Post by aspenmayer »

scns wrote: post #140
CalChris wrote: post #106

This was just a preference cliff, plain+simple. Windsurf got paid maybe $3B for itself. But the investors and senior management got their cut first. How? Well, the preferences they negotiated. No one really knows how the game is played The art of the trade How the sausage gets made We just assume that it happens But no one else is in the room where it happens #2 wasn't in the room when it happened. In a very real sen…

> in the room where it happens Great song from Hamilton. Sorry for being off topic.

Lin Manuel Miranda is a poet and a scholar. Original cast video of the song in question:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_FWUW6SnDo

Re: Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth

#230

Post by rectang »

I feel like there needs to be the analogue of open source licenses for equity offers. Something standardized, so that both employees and management could negotiate in good faith with high confidence that the terms are as advertised.

Because right now, there has been too much innovation in ways to screw over employees and the only reasonable assumption is that equity will vanish.

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